Leaving

I will remember how the slanted light
visited my room, and how the clock
I mended - so many years ago - measured
the flow of then through now to next
dropping each steady second in the pool
of such time as is left. They drop like stones.

Somewhere the furniture that lived with me
will still be knocking about. My chair. My desk.
The little bed I dreamed on, waited, wept,
now are all gone, to dustiness, to sales
and nothing to hold but untold memories.
A floorboard creaks, door closes, last look back,
and then the turned key, prisoning the heart.


Tess at Willow Manor offered Andrew Wyeth's picture "Big Room"
for this week's Magpie prompt.

Haiku in 'N' Dimensions

Interesting how

Kline's picture looks a bit  like

a Mobius loop  . . .

Magpie Tales#113

Tess at Willow Manor gives us Marc Chagall's 1954 picture "Red Roofs" to work from this week.

Beginnings.

   I was just about the last in my class to start.  Who would forget the date - St.Valentine's Day - in my fourteenth year, 3 days after my birthday?  I joke about that now. That first morning it didn't seem all that funny. I knew what was happening through a waking dream and the blood spots in my pyjamas and on the undersheet. Was I supposed to be overwhelmed? Surprised? Had I thought I'd somehow been excused the woman's ritual? I explored between my legs. Bloody fingertips for verification. But there was none of the discomfort my classmates complained of.  I got out of bed and stuffed a handtowel into my pyjama pants - don't ask me why - and shuffled to my bedroom window. Some girls moaned on about headaches, gripey pains, and some got uber-bitchy with everybody. So far I felt O.K., till I realized I was crying.

   There had been more snow, but it had stopped now and was thawing. On the roof of the outhouse below my bedroom window patches of red were spreading, replacing the downy snow, showing the rough, hard tiles.  

   I could hear Mum downstairs and sounds of the kitchen table being laid for breakfast and because of the state I was in I didn't want to go down, so I went to the top of the stairs and called out "Mum!  Mum?" and when she called up, "What is it  Lucy love? There's a clean blouse down here if you can't find one," I leaned on the bannister rail, not knowing what words I would use to her, knowing only that now, on this special day for lovers, my childhood was truly over.

.

Magpie Tales#105

The picture prompt from Tess reminded me of a cycling story my Dad used to tell.

It Takes Allsorts . . .

Beryl Burton (1937 - 1996) should never have straddled a bike if her doctors were to be believed. She suffered a serious attack of rheumatic fever as a young girl and was advised to avoid strenuous activity - like cycle racing. She went on to hold British records for cycle time-trials  at 10, 25, 50 and 100 miles and the 12 and 24 hour distance trials. She won World Championships on the road  and track on bikes that look quite old fashioned compared with today's aerodynamic machines costing up to £80,000!

Dad was a keen cyclist himself and would sometimes go the extra mile to see the "greats" of the era at work.  His "Beryl the Peril" story concerns the British 12 hour endurance trial of 1967, in which Beryl set a new record of 277.25 miles . . a doddle at an average speed of over 23 miles per hour. (On yer bikes, ladies and gents, and try it for one hour or even one mile!)   Near the end of the 12 hours Beryl caught and passed the leading male rider , Mike McNamara, who turned in a new mens' record of just over 276 miles in the same event. Beryl held this all-comers record for nearly two years, and today 40 years on, it is still the womens' record.

Endurance competitors would fuel themselves with dried fruit and sweets and such high energy snacks and as Beryl stormed past the flagging Mike she handed him a liquorice allsort which he acknowledged with a wave and munched as Beryl disappeared into the distance.  Dad would get quite misty-eyed telling this tale, pointing out how it exemplified the sportsmanship and cameraderie enjoyed by cycle racers in those days, adding "Of course, our Beryl was a Yorkshire lass," as if this explained everything.

The incident was commemorated in a little ceremony shown below when the Rockingham Forest Wheelers presented Beryl (by now retired) with a giant liquorice allsort.

Her story ends sadly when the Docs' advice caught up with her. She died of a heart attack, on her beloved bike, while out delivering invitations to her upcoming birthday party.

Poetry of the Senses

Hosting Poetry Jam this week, Dani asks for poems on our senses.  Here's one about a significant loss of one of them.   (I posted this poem on January 15th. last year in response to Tess Kincaid's Magpie#48)

Affliction

"Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf."

They heard the windswept tremolos in awe,

their ebb and flo, as waves crash on the strand,

an undertow to anger, loss, to pain, 

his jagged figures challenging despair.

"Speak louder, shout, for I am. Deaf."

They asked “What does your new sonata mean?”

Can you imagine the withering look this brought?

How he might snort and shake his untidy locks?

“Go to your Shakespeare! Read ‘Tempest’” he scoffed.

"Speak louder, shout, for I. Am. Deaf."

‘Tempest’ The nickname stuck!  At least it’s more

appropriate than “Moonlight”  No moonbeams

light the rage of that finale, never mind

triplets that lap the shore of Lake Lucerne.

Go to “The Tempest”, then. So. Does he mean

his new work is 'rough magic'? Or perhaps

the lilting rondo is Miranda’s dance

at her wedding to noble Ferdinand?

For sure in the wintry gales we hear

a ship grind on the reef, splinter in shards

and sink to the deeps on bass arpeggios

I prefer “Our revels now are ended.”

Here he admits the best of life is over.

From now on all that seems sublime, heroic,

wild, will play out only in his unkempt head,

where still he hears what his ear no longer can,

with courage that proves the artist and the man.

"Speak louder. Shout, for I am DEAF."

Beethoven composed the D minor piano sonata, Op.31 No.2 (sometimes referred to as “The Tempest Sonata”) in 1801/02 at the age of 32, the same year that he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament in which he admits his almost total deafness. 

Much more about Beethoven on John Suchet's website  "Mad About Beethoven"

Magpie#101

A Haiku Lament

Now what shall I do?

Amazon's Gift Wrap service

knocked off half way through.

Posted in response to Tess Kincaid's recent Magpie prompt from Willow Manor.

What Makes You Really, Really Angry?

I wrote this little poem in response to a request for poems about Thanksgiving from Kerry O'Connor at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads. So here's a picture of a Real Toad, sadly not an imaginary one, indulging in one of those quaint traditions that makes America the Greatest Nation on Earth.

It meets the 55 word allowance for G-Man's Friday Flash Fiction, so let's electrocute or otherwise terminate with extreme prejudice, two birds with one stone. 

Pardon

If you're full-breasted, feathered, tender, lucky
Mister President may save you from the pot
and you'll give thanks for this Thanksgiving -

but if you're poor, uneducated, black,
and some thumbs-in-gunbelt sheriff, real hot-shot
and white cops and judge and jury all say "It's HIM!"
and point you to Death Row -

he certainly will not.